X marks the spot, and in more ways than one. Twitter is now set to lose its iconic “blue bird” logo in arguably what is the most dramatic change to the micro-blogging site in the Musk regime. Elon Musk, its billionaire owner and former CEO, announced that the social media platform’s iconic blue bird logo will now be relabelled as the letter “X.”
The move retires the iconic Twitter logo in Musk’s rebranding effort to make Twitter an all-in-one “everything app,”. Apart from the upcoming logo change, the X.com domain has already started redirecting users to https://twitter.com.
https://t.co/bOUOek5Cvy now points to https://t.co/AYBszklpkE.
Interim X logo goes live later today.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2023
Elon Musk announced the move in a series of late-night tweets on Saturday, sharing that the bird logo and the name “Twitter” will soon be bid adieu, and the social media company will henceforth be known as X. The latter surprises absolutely nobody, Musk has been calling the company X Corp ever since he bought it last year, and X Corp is already the official legal entity name of the social media company. For those who need a reminder, a court filing in California on April 4 had stated that the name Twitter Inc. “no longer exists.”
“Interim X logo goes live later today,” Musk had tweeted. And if this is not enough, Musk will also change what we call “tweets” once Twitter’s brand name and logo officially changes to X (at the time of writing the article, both the Twitter name and bird logo are visible). Musk wrote in a tweet on Sunday that once the change occurs, the new name for a tweet will be “an X.”
What will be the new name for a tweet once Twitter changes its name to X?
— WOLF (@WOLF_Financial) July 23, 2023
Musk’s obsession with the letter X is well-known. The letter “X” has been on just about everything Musk has touched for the last two-plus decades. X.com was the original name for Paypal, and features in the name of Musk’s space company – SpaxeX. It is also in the name for the Tesla SUV, and Musk already bought the X.com domain from Paypal six years ago. In a late-night post on Saturday, Musk tweeted that the X logo will replace the Twitter blue bird – which, along with the brand name, are not evidently long for this world – as soon as Sunday or Monday across the globe.
It remains to be seen whether relegating the blue bird to the garbage chute of internet history brings an end to Twitter’s troubles. The social media company, operating with a skeleton crew, has faced numerous upheavals, chaos, and troubles ever since Musk acquired the micro-blogging site – things went so bad that advertisers opted to abandon ship and frustrated Twitterati opted to rush to Instagram’s Threads instead (which already has over 150 million global downloads). For her part, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino appeared optimistic about the change, claiming that “X will go further, transforming the global town square.”
